Another Look at Social Dimension ( 6 of 8 )

Coincidentally, the scheduling of Art & Language's exhibition at two of the three proposed venues overlapped with that of the touring schedule for the "Modern Masters" exhibition. With this situation in mind, Art & Language decided to set the issues of cultural provincialism and dependency before the Australian public by organizing a series of public discussions at the museums. These discussions were to be led by Terry Smith and an invited guest, who "would attempt to embed the telex message in dialogue with each other and the audience." Among the invited guests were Humphrey McQueen, an art history from the Australian National University, Canberra; Lucy Lippard, the well-known New York-based art critic; Henry Kripps, philosopher of science, Melbourne University; and students from the art departments of the Preston Institute of Technology, Melbourne University and other art schools. Only by "explosively" mapping Art & Language's life-world onto the "reality" of an international cultural exchange, so the theory went, could the issues of cultural imperialism be brought to light in a non-patronizing way. The fact that these "blurts" were being telexed from New York was supposed to raise the question of the problems associated with the importation of art.

This was not to be yet another "trans-oceanic lecture, but a dialogue, our [ Art & Language's] fragments of conversation" read the exhibition poster. "These fragments (the cabled "blurts") are anticipated to pick up a lot of (your) socio-cultural 'noise,' as well as reflect a lot of ours . . . there isn't, between you and me, a clear channel. Making the 'noise' explicit or accessible is making ordinarily habitual processes self-conscious, transformations can be projected from surface to depth, and hence - and here is the point - we have some potential for revisability of our languaging/cultural situations . . ." One telex summed this up rather bluntly, asserting that "the only reaction you can have to Modern Masters in Australia is to consume it . . . there is no learning situation. It exemplifies a notion of culture that is essentially abstract, that is apart from what people do." The Art & Language discussions were planned to take place in the midst of the museums' galleries. The first museum cancelled the group's exhibition scheduled for April 1975 on the grounds that it would detract from the MOMA show. After becoming aware of the details of Art & Language's project, museum officials in Sydney claimed that a "lecture" was not an art exhibit and therefore belonged in an auditorium not a museum. Curator Lieberman of MOMA threatened the director of the National Gallery of Victoria with a law suit if Art & Language's project was allowed to go forward. Under intense pressure, MOMA backed down from that position, stating that they didn't care where the Art & Language exhibition was, as long as it isn't in the midst of the "Modern Masters." The project was subsequently shifted to the adjacent art school, part of the Victoria College of the Arts; an institution which had no connection with the museum. Despite petty harassment by museum officials and a refusal to advertise the project, a considerable number of the hundreds of people who daily attended "Modern Masters" also visited the Art & Language discussion room. Transcripts of the proceedings at each of the venues edited by Terry Smith and additional documentary material was published that same year as Art & Language: Australia 1975 . A case can be made for nominating Ian Burn - a key participant in Art & Language in New York between 1970 and 1977 - as the instigator of questions on cultural imperialism and underdevelopment; a discussion most insistently framed in terms of the Australian experience of North American modernism. Conversations took place between Burn and Mel Ramsden and other members of Art & Language in New York on these and related issues beginning in early-1973. Burn's article "Provincialism" which appeared in Art Dialogue in October 1973 was followed by Terry Smith's text "The Provincialism Problem" ( Artforum, February 1974). An expanded discussion by Burn, Ramsden and Smith appeared in Draft for an Anti-Textbook, published by Art & Language Press in the autumn of 1974.

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